If it is possible to inform drivers of information of positions where near misses (“hiyari-hatto” in Japanese), that is, events for which drivers feel a chill or are startled, such as being about to come in touch with a crossing person during driving, tend to occur, it is possible to prevent an accident from occurring. For specifying information of positions where near misses tend to occur, data recorded in a drive recorder can be utilized. For example, a position of a vehicle, data and hour of imaging, acceleration of the vehicle, a velocity of the vehicle, a video image in front of the vehicle, and so forth are recorded in the drive recorder.
If it is attempted to detect near misses on the basis of only numerical value data such as the acceleration recorded in the drive recorder, events which were not near misses in fact are falsely detected as near misses in some cases. This is because there is a case where the acceleration changes abruptly during traveling of a vehicle due to up and down of a road or the like even if they have no relations to near misses.
For preventing false detection of near misses as described above, it is demanded to analyze whether there is a near miss from a video image in front of the vehicle recorded together with the acceleration.
As causes of occurrence of near misses, existence of detection objects, such as a front car, a crossing person, and a bicycle existing in an own lane can be mentioned. For determining whether the detection object that might be a cause of a near miss exists, therefore, it is determined whether a body detected from a video image exists in the own lane. As the conventional technique that treats the own lane as a monitoring object region of a detection object, a conventional technique that treats a lane in which the own vehicle is traveling and a conventional technique that treats as a region coupling white line positions on the left and right of the own vehicle and the infinite point as a monitoring object region can be mentioned.
With regard to the conventional technology, see Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2000-315255, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2004-280194, and Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2006-018751, for example.